“Though we observe the higher law/ and though we have our quarrel just,/ Were I permitted to withdraw/ You wouldn’t see my arse for dust./ A soldier’s verse”
First of three header quotations in Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era on Section or Chapter VII
“I got off to a roaring stop”
Me on sitting down to work December 29, 2924 with an ambitious agenda of cleaning up fundamentals and being immediately overwhelmed by urgent trivia in yesterday’s leftover email.
“The drivers ahead of us appear to be descended from monkeys who weren’t making it as monkeys.”
Me in traffic on the afternoon of December 17, 2024
“I go slap through a roomful of MSS., criticizing deuced conscientiously, with the result that I post back some years of MSS. to addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums.”
G.K. Chesterton writing to E.C. Bentley (the Clerihew guy) in 1895 describing his workday and the various tasks he undertakes for a publishing house, Redway, including clearing a backlog of manuscripts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
“Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.”
Emailed without attribution by a friend
“Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.”
“Rod St. Denis, Sudbury, Ont.” quoted as “Your morning smile” in Globe & Mail November 29, 2006
“‘My friends, I have no more against work than the next man,’ Bobby [O’Brien, who was totally lazy] would reply. ‘In fact, nothing fascinates me more than work. I can sit here and watch it all day, if you’ll only give me the chance.’”
“The Week of Sundays,” called just “this old tale”, in William Bennett The Book of Virtues [but it owes a lot, perhaps too much, to a similar line from Jerome K. Jerome]
“His [Cicero’s] incredible vanity appears more amiably here [in his letters] than in his orations, where he seems to be carrying his own statue with him wherever he goes…”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ